Inhaltsbereich

Abstract Müller

Mappings and Creative Metaphors in Political Discourse

Creative metaphors are easy to find, since they are fore-grounded by virtue of their (relative) novelty; thus, they are prominent. However, reliable identification of creative metaphors is a considerable challenge, as it requires an analysis of the metaphor in question on various levels including text, context and discourse. Therefore, there is a need for a wide set of criteria that supplement the reader’s intuition or evidence from corpus frequencies (Deignan 2005, 40).

This talk discusses different cases of creative realisations of conceptual metaphors in German political speeches and focuses on the issue of how to analyse creativity on a conceptual level. Two basic assumptions guide this study: (1) Creativity exists along clines (Carter 2004) and should, therefore, be evaluated with respect to historical context, genre and discourse (supported by corpus analyses). (2) Creative metaphors are fore-grounded by linguistic deviation or discourse deviation (cf. Cook 1994; Semino 1997). The notion of discourse deviation is of particular interest in this talk, since it allows an account of conceptual innovation which is directly relevant to the discussion of mappings.

References

Carter, Ronald (2004): Language and Creativity. The Art of Common Talk, London.

Cook, Guy (1994): Discourse and Literature. The Interplay of Form and Mind, Oxford.

Deignan, Alice (2005): Metaphor and Corpus Linguistics, Amsterdam.

Semino, Elena (1997): Language and World Creation in Poems and other Texts, London.